The Comedy is Finished

26

Koo opens his eyes from confused dreams of family and flight, to find Joyce looming over him, staring down at his face with great intensity. Orienting himself, seeing the mirrored ceiling with himself and Joyce reflected in it like a bad genre painting, Koo clears his husky throat and says, “The soup lady.”

She blinks, as though she’d been lost in thought, then turns to look over her shoulder at the door. “We don’t have much time,” she says.

“We don’t?”

“I’m getting you out of here.”

Koo sits up, astounded. “Careful now,” he says. “I’m the one tells the jokes.”

“It isn’t a joke. I’m a...a double agent.”

A crazy. Koo pastes a happy smile on his face. “That’s terrific,” he says, in the style of the ultimate naïf. “A double agent. Afterwards, you’ll be able to collect unemployment insurance twice a week.”

“They signaled me during that television show.”

“Is that right? Fancy that.”

“I can see you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Didn’t you notice the one thing he said that wasn’t about anything? St. Clair; he said, ‘Two-thirteen Van Dyke.’ Remember that?”

As a matter of fact, Koo does; it had been an unexpected anomaly in the middle of the program. But the program itself had been such a catalogue of horrors that Koo—and probably everybody else watching it—had promptly forgotten that quick enigma. “What is it, your code name?”

“A phone number.” There’s something about the very intensity of her manner that forces him to believe her. “The two-thirteen is the area code.”

“Los Angeles,” Koo says, in some surprise. “This very metropolis, in fact.”

“I worked for them for a few years, and that’s always the way they got in touch with me. An area code, and a phone number done as a name. Van Dyke sometimes, and sometimes Lydgate. If I hear one of those names, and the area code, I know how to make contact.”

“You dial the seven letters. Van Dyke.”

“That’s right.” Looking uncertain for just a second, maybe even oddly saddened, she says, “It’s been years since they signaled me. A long long time.”

“Probably, they were busy.”

“I called them,” Joyce says, and double agent or not there’s something wild-eyed about her, something unhinged. “And they said I should get you out of here now.”

“I agree with them.”

“But we must be very quiet.”

“I agree with you.”

Holding a finger to her lips, she moves away across the room, opening the mirrored door, leaning out, then gesturing Koo to follow her, which he does.

This is his first view of the rest of the house, and it’s disappointingly ordinary after that bedroom. There’s also the sound of surf, faintly, from a distance; is that why he dreamed about drowning in the ocean?

The house is dim and quiet, but doesn’t have the echoing quality of a place without people. Koo is very aware of the unseen presences under this roof, unseen and hostile, as he creeps down the carpeted stairs behind Joyce. He’s scared, but at the same time this is exhilarating; finally he’s doing something.

At the foot of the stairs Joyce pats the air at him—wait—then leaves briefly to reconnoiter. Koo is beginning very strongly to feel his vulnerability when at last she returns, waving him to come on.

There’s a stone-walled living room through a broad doorway. Koo glances at it, and stops dead when he sees there’s someone in there! Liz, the tough one, is seated in an Eames chair, legs curled under her, either brooding or asleep. High again? Koo is afraid to move; won’t movement attract her attention?

To his left, Joyce is urgently motioning to him: Come on, come on. He hesitates, then somewhere to the right a door opens and there are voices. In a sudden rush he crosses the open space to the shadowed areaway where Joyce is waiting.

The voices approach. Koo listens apprehensively for Mark, but the first identifiable voice belongs to Larry, saying, “How can you justify this, Peter?”

Peter’s voice says, “The Movement can’t be mocked. We can’t permit it.”

They go past the areaway as a third voice, one Koo hasn’t heard before, says, “It’ll be interesting to see just how far you’ll go in practice, as opposed to theory.” This voice is nasty, angry, sarcastic.

“As far as necessary,” Peter says. They’re just the other side of this wall now, apparently in the kitchen; Koo hears drawers being opened and closed. Peter says, “There was a knife here, a long carving knife. Where the hell is it?”

A long carving knife? Koo presses his back against the wall, trying to be one more shadow among the shadows. What are they up to now?

The nasty voice says, “Here’s a cleaver. Just the thing, I should think.”

“All right, give it to me.” And one more drawer slams, then the three men march out of the room and start up the stairs.

Joyce grabs Koo’s arm, tugs at him. Yes, yes. Those three are going up to where they think Koo is, and they’re carrying a cleaver; feet trembling in haste, Koo follows Joyce down another flight of stairs between living room and kitchen, and through a door into a sudden rush of cool moist air. Joyce closes the door, hurriedly but silently, and whispers, “Come on! We have to hurry!”

“Check.”

No outcry yet from above. They run out from under the cantilevered deck into thick sand, hard to move through. The ocean is out there, under a half moon in a clear black sky. Where is this place? No way to tell; it could be any one of a hundred spots between Newport Beach and Oxnard. Koo looks back, trying to guess where they are from the look of the houses, but Joyce pulls at his arm, crying over the surf. “Come on! Hurry!”

“Yes. Right.” But she’s urging him directly toward the ocean, not along the beach. “Where—” The exertion of running through the sand is rapidly using up his strength. “Where—”

“They have a boat. We’re supposed to meet the boat. Hurry!”

The hard sand of high tide line; Koo moves more quickly, Joyce dropping back. A boat? Koo trots forward, gasping, arms pumping, staring out at the black sea with its eerie line of phosphorescence forming and rolling and dying way out there in the cold dark. A boat? Seeing nothing, Koo turns his head to gasp another question, and behind him, rushing at him ahead of Joyce’s savage straining face, is dull moonlight striking yellow from the blade of a long knife. A knife held in her raised fist.

“Jesus!” Koo backpedals, turning, tripping over his own feet, trying to run backward away from the slashing knife, throwing his arms up to fend it off, and the blade slices across his forearm, grating on bone, slitting the flesh like cutting through raw veal. There isn’t pain, not at first, but there’s the horrible knowledge; his flesh has been cut. Koo screams, falls backwards, rolls and rolls, blood spraying from his arm in red showers, and the panting mad girl lunges after him on all fours, stabbing downward, scraping the dull side of the blade along his ribcage, jabbing the knife into the sand, pulling it out with both hands, holding it high in both hands, following him on her knees.

Koo is mindless with terror, gibbering, “Don’t don’t don’t don’t NO JEE-SUS!”

“You’re tearing us apart,” he hears her mutter, through the crash of surf. “Tearing us apart.” And she struggles to her feet, the knife huge and straight and unbending in her hand.

Koo tries to rise, falls back, throws his arms up again and she slashes twice, back and forth. Great triangular strips of flesh hang from his arms, and even in his agony the gag interpretation rises in his shocked mind: She’s filleting me. “Let me go! Let me go! I won’t tell!”

She stops, the red-clouded knife hovering as she sways over him. “Peter would hate me.” Her eyes are also clouded, voice swollen as though her mouth and throat are already clogged with his blood. “We can survive if you’re dead.” And she drops on him, slashing down again, as Koo screams, the loudest harshest most final scream in the world—and all at once Joyce flings herself back from him, as though flying.

No; she doesn’t fling herself, she is thrown. A black figure has come out of the ocean, moving with the speed of dark, a blur of vicious motion; it swarms over Joyce, compelling, irrevocable. Something dull and hard is in its upraised fist, thudding down, thudding again, over and over, the sound first dry and then wet.

Koo struggles to get up, but can barely lift his head. His blood-streaming shredded arms have no strength. “Oh,” he whispers, in what was meant to be a cry for help. “Oh, God.”

People now are running this way from the house. There’s no escape, no safety anywhere. The figure hulking over what had been Joyce turns to him, throwing away the dark sea-rock, dropping to his knees beside Koo, murmuring, “Easy. Easy.”

Koo can barely recognize Mark in this beatific nurse, bending over him, carefully touching his arms. “Don’t,” he begs.

“Lucky fat man,” Mark says, almost tenderly. “We’ll fix you at the house.”

“Mark,” Koo whispers. “You’re all wet.”

It’s true. From head to foot Mark is wet, as drenched with water as Koo is drenched with his own blood. Mark’s eyes gleam like that far-off phosphorescence. “I’ve saved your life,” he says, quick and low and triumphant. “It’s mine. We start fresh.”

The other people are pounding across the beach, are nearly here. “Mark,” Koo whispers. “Help me.”

“You’re mine again,” Mark tells him, slipping his arms under Koo’s body, preparing to lift him.

“Help me. You’re the only one,” Koo whispers, and as Mark lifts him he faints.